And so the iOS-ification of Mac OS X continues. Apple has just announced that all applications submitted to the Mac App Store have to use sandboxing by March 2012. While this has obvious security advantages, the concerns are numerous - especially since Apple's current sandboxing implementation and associated rules makes a whole lot of applications impossible.

Apple was the first one to actually try and pull this off on such a big scale. On the App Store, they did well enough that both users and developers benefitted. I seriously doubt apps on the iOS platform would have been such a huge deal if it weren't for the App Store. I'd say give them some credit for actually trying to make this change for the better happen.

iOS AppStore was a new thing. there was no "big scale" or "change" anything. This is a major change to an existing software delivery process.
They may be able to fine tune it to have it work as well as iOS, but this will have a lot more veteran MacOS developers up in arms.

iOS AppStore was a new thing. there was no "big scale" or "change" anything.

Sure there was. Other mobile platforms before it didn't have App Stores and allowed you to install your apps freely. There never were as much apps written for it, though.

This is a major change to an existing software delivery process. They may be able to fine tune it to have it work as well as iOS, but this will have a lot more veteran MacOS developers up in arms.

It wouldn't be the first time Apple uprooted it platform to make a change for the better. In the last 20 years, they changed processor architectures twice (first from m68k to PowerPC, then from PowerPC to Intel), Moved to a whole other OS (Classic to OSX), deprecated an entire developer API (With carbon not going 64 bit), and axed countless other developer technologies (GameSprockets, OpenDoc, ...)

Each and every one of these changes required developers for the platform to retool their apps in a significant way. Each announced change was met with mixed reactions. So this moaning isn't new at all and will happen every time Apple decides to change something. And each time some developers throw in the towel and call it quits.

The impact of each and one of these changes on the viability of the platform have been neglible. Stuff gets rewritten conforming the new way of doing things, and gaping holes leave a space for newer, more modern apps to spring up, apps that wouldn't have seen the light of day if the legacy app using obsolete code still was around.

Also, its not like developers weren't aware of these rules. It was announced that this would be a requirement the first day the Mac App Store was launched. The only reason why it wasn't imposed from day one is to offer developers a grace period to adjust their apps on the store.

There was a commonly used iOS app store before that AppStore arrived on the iOS scene? Now that is big news to me...

gaping holes leave a space for newer, more modern apps to spring up, apps that wouldn't have seen the light of day if the legacy app using obsolete code still was around.

And that would be the case if these restrictions would add something beneficial, like the move from Carbon to Cocoa. However, this move is ill thought-out and brings only new restrictions not functionality(as it stands today).